A Brief Return
by timydamonkey
Summary: [Oneshot] He doesn't want to, but he knows he has to turn his back again, even if it's what's driven him so crazy. He can't stay, or they'll be hurt. It's for their own good. Ah, the dynamics of heroics.


A Brief Return:

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**Please read before the fic:** Hi. This is meant to sound really disjointed... it's also supposed to have a very bitter undertone, hence the swearing (and the reason I've rated this T... truth be told, there's only one or two swear words, just not very nice ones. I tend not to use them in writing, but Danny isn't very eloquent in these circumstances). Not sure how it works, and I'd LOVE feedback on this. So, please review? 

Additionally, to Paradoxical readers, I haven't forgotten you. If you want my stream of updating excuses (condensed version!): was sick over Christmas and lost my voice (it was three quarters whisper and a quarter croak, and utterly inaudible), then I've just had my first set of A level exams - General Studies, Sociology and Computing. I had to do revision. Thankfully, I have no English or Maths exams this term:)

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Dsiclaimer: I kept forgetting these - but no, I still don't own Danny Phantom.

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He is back in Amity Park, the backpack thrown over his back. The memories, they're overwhelming, and he wants to tug out his hair, and scream, and scream, and scream. He cannot do this, as a voice in his head will say, _Danny, don't be such a child. _There is nobody there to listen, and the remnants of memory, of his parents and sister scolding him, would be too much. 

Thinking this, he doesn't so much as twitch. He learns quickly, and his face is a mask – the man behind it, Danny says, is still only half there.

The pain of it all, he feels it suffocating him, a hand choking his neck. He's angry, and the guilt – oh, god, there's guilt. His parents, they were gone. In the void. They weren't ghosts, he hoped. He didn't relish the idea of having to fight them, and he was sure the thought of being something they hated would have finished them off sooner.

Jazz, too, dead in the space of a couple of months. He knows why: because they're related to him, because he is the infamous ghost boy who, no matter how hard he tries, just can't seem to stop pissing off homicidal ghosts.

The ghosts, they took cheap shots. Danny knows; he knows they attacked his family rather than risking his wrath. A ridiculous notion, really – _what_ wrath? There hadn't been any, not then. He'd step back and let them hurt him to save his family anyway – superhero complex, he supposed. Now, he knows that the ghosts don't know this; that they are so estranged from emotions that they can't even grasp this simple concept.

But he knows he can't turn back time, and the one who can – _goddamn him_ – refuses to help. Pathetic! Nineteen, and he is alone. His friends, he hasn't spoken to them in so long – if ghosts are playing on his attachments, he cannot have any. They will attack him if there is nothing else that will hurt him.

Danny knows this.

He feels mad. Crazy. Bonkers. Off his head. Insane. He wants it to stop. After everything happened, he considered pulling a trigger on his parents' weapons, on charging a few ghosts in some suicidal plea, but he laughed at the notion. It would do no good. Besides, knowing his luck, he wouldn't even die properly. He'd stick around as a ghost, or exterminate his ghost part, or even better, the icing on the _fucking_ cake, he'd just end up with a hole blasted in him and nothing happening.

_Oh!_ People would say. _Look at that boy!_

And he'd stand there, and he'd be thinking, _Yeah, roll up, roll up, to see the walking freak show._

He'd scrapped the idea, and somewhere, he knows it was for the best. Somewhere.

In front of him, the air shimmers with materialisation. He shudders and straightens up. It's somebody he knows – some days, he feels like he knows all the occupants of the ghost zone, and it's not as if he makes it a habit to go there.

Skulker calls, "Ghost child! It has been a long while, but now that I have found you, I will rest your pelt at the foot of my bed!"

The ghost never seems to change. Same old lines, same old story. Danny rummages around in his backpack, and gets out a gun, one of his parents inventions. The names of his parents' inventions, they mesh in his mind now as he tries to avoid thinking of them. He thinks that maybe it's called an ectogun, something like that. A Fenton Ectogun? The right name or not, he supposes it's sort of fitting for it still to be wielded by a Fenton.

He shoots. "Get lost, Skulker!"

The hunter ghost dodges, and he's laughing, and it's not funny, and Danny can feel the anger building up. "What is wrong, ghost child? Children can put up a better fight… however, maybe you've learned that succumbing to the inevitable is the best thing to do?"

"Get away from me, or I swear, I'll blow you to pieces!"

And then Skulker's laughing again, but this time for a different reason. "Oh dear, oh dear, the ghost boy is turning into his parents!"

Shot. Shot. Shot. Bingo. The ghost recoils from the hit, but it isn't much.

"You have no right to talk about my parents!" Danny yells, and his hand is shaking. He wants to blast Skulker apart, the stupid banter crawling into his skull like cockroaches, and about as annoying.

"Your artillery is outdated and ineffective," Skulker informs him, and fires a rocket at him. Danny simply sidesteps, having no wish to be melodramatic. He knows he could destroy himself if he just went ghost, but he does not want to subject himself to that… to feelings he was trying to disassociate himself from.

The streets are no longer so silent, and people have noticed.

In the street, behind him, a man is yelling, "Ghost!" and then he's not, and he is gone, back to wherever he came from. Screaming all the way.

Skulker's hand is smoking from the blast. The seething anger, Danny thinks it must be visible around him, the heat, the red hot rage.

He has no time for this. This is not his life – he will not exist for others to die because of him, but he's being consumed in his whole anger. Everything. The unfairness of it all, it's there, and his hand is itching to fasten itself around Skulker's neck and _squeeze_. If one cannot die again, an eternity of torture would do – suffer for the fatalities and injuries you've inflicted on others.

Breathe in, breathe out. Stay calm, and you live to fight another day. Fight in blind rage and you're so open, you're a walking target.

He turns. He should not have come back. His back feels the lashes from the cruelty of it all, of old wounds reopening. His skin tingles. He will leave.

Walk away from it all.

Skulker is laughing and laughing, and calling, "Oh, I never thought I'd see the day you ended up being easier to kill, easier to upset than your elder sister."

He stops, turns, fires. Skulker is taken by surprise, and the gun blasts him back into a wall. It's a weapon designed by his parents; he'd be willing to bet that it was extremely painful. Skulker's howls seemed to say so, and the feeling of what felt like little hands trying to forcibly tear you apart… literally, as Danny's father would have said, molecule by molecule was grasping at him in a bid from revenge. Revenge from beyond the grave does not necessarily need a ghost.

It's almost musical, and he thinks he can hear the screams hit a crescendo, and with that, Skulker is gone. Good riddance to bad rubbish, he wants to say.

Danny, he's turning back and walking onwards. He must walk the long road to freedom from guilt, freedom from his own life, freedom from the blasted spirits whose primary concern seemed to be to spend their afterlives ruining his life.

The door, that front door of the house behind where the argument took place, slammed open, and after a pause, a voice says, "Danny?" Like it was a dream, a hope, an apparition who's come to ride away with her. This goth, she knows who she's been waiting for all this time.

The anger at Skulker, it's fading away, and the bitterness is back to leaving him sick to his stomach. This goth, he knows her well, but he is too big a coward to face her.

The silhouette of him walking away is gone, and there is nothing – a man disappeared into the breeze. The shadows are dancing and writhing at where he was just stood, as if demanding their own kind of retribution for taking such pleasure in the seizure of Skulker. The boy is so worn, there's nothing left to punish.

The goth, she's standing and staring at nothing, and there are tears trickling down her face. She knows there will never be any closure, and it's still tearing apart her heart, like the invention Jack had made before he died. Like, molecule by molecule, the heart is disappearing, and it's too agonising to even scream.

Clenching her fists, nails biting into her hand, she stomps back into the building, and the door slams shut behind her with a final shuddering clang.


End file.
